It would be cool if that plant still existed today, with planes inside of it staged “frozen” on the production line at each phase of assembly. It would be a unique museum. http://blog.hemmings.com/index.php/2013/04/29/willow-run-assembly-plant-faces-the-wrecking-ball/
OK, here’s a crash course in manufacturing engineering. Any machine more complex than a hammer is going to have parts that fit together. There are three main ways of doing this.
- Making the design with big gaps in it so it can take parts with a wide variation in sizes (the variation in size is known as a “tolerance”). This is by and large the Soviet route - you get high production and what you make is very robust, but the design is forced to be pretty crude.
- Making the design with small gaps in it and then modifying the parts until they all fit together. This is largely the British and German method (as a hybrid with (1) above). This allows much more sophisticated designs than the Soviet model, but requires both higher skill levels and many more man hours. It’s effectively a cottage industry way of building things.
- Making all the parts exactly the right size, so that they fit together first time every time. There are two ways of doing this:
- Measuring every single part and fettling them until they’re the right size. The British and Germans did this occasionally, so every machine required a skilled operator.
- Measuring a statistically significant sample of parts and adjusting the machine until they all come out right first time. This means you don’t need a skilled operator on the machine, nor is the process flow interrupted while you’re measuring the parts. That was Deming’s idea, and a stroke of genius it was too.
Postwar, US industry largely went back to method (1) as they had prewar. Cost is about the same (assuming you don’t care about quality). The advantage of Deming’s method is that the quality goes up (to beyond the level possible using method (2), typically) without really affecting cost, while the skill level required actually goes down. Deming went to Japan, where their car industry treated him with something approaching awe. The Deming Prize has been awarded in Japan since 1951 for advances in quality improvement - and this quality is why Japanese carmakers were able to largely take over the world car market starting in the 1970s.
So I infer from your very good breakdown of the processes is that the Deming method promotes an automated assembly line process with a minimum of people involved in tweaking anything. The human element is removed and the machine pumps out the blueprinted widgets. Is this correct? If so then how is this not mass-production? If I still fail to understand your position then please excuse my ignorance.
Moreover it is ironic that an American went to Japan and taught them quality.
More or less. Humans are still involved, but the whole process is de-skilled while improving the consistency of the output. This reduces the chance of mistakes being made, and hence means that the final product will be of better quality. Under the Deming-style process humans still usually slot the thing together, but it goes together correctly first time every time.
Deming going to Japan is the reason that most manufacturing buzzwords are either directly in Japanese (Kaizen, Kanban) or developed in Japan and known under other names (Six Sigma, Five S). Most of them are either pretty obvious when you think about it, but nobody did before Deming and the Japanese were the only ones to really pay attention. The Japanese are still the best in the world at it by some margin - other places can manufacture as efficiently, but overall nobody else does lean design/design for manufacture anywhere nearly as well.
Great info.
It’s still counter-intuitive and misleading about the Japanese quality ethos–as it was created by an American! And this quality paradigm/mindshare has been used against American manufacturing for decades!
The perils of being the best in the world - the temptation to stay fat, dumb and happy instead of innovating your arse off is ever present. That, ultimately, is what killed the US car industry. Thankfully other sectors weren’t so badly complacent.
I agree with your premise here, but the US car industry is hardly “dead.” I think sales of domestics have skyrocketed in the US and both Ford and GM are making money hand-over-fist…
Compared to what it was? They had to be taken to the brink of destruction before they paid attention, and a substantial fraction didn’t survive…
Most of the substantial fraction had already been consolidated by the time the “Big Three” ran into serious trouble with their shitty marketing (or rather, attempting to set the market rather than adapting to it) and poor quality control on poorly conceived new cars. The last one being American Motors Corp (AMC) that made some legendary, ugly but serviceable cars such as my dad’s old “Pacer”, which Chrysler took over for the Jeeps. LOL The great depression killed off far more car makers here then Detroit’s notorious downfall in the 1970’s. Part of the problem was their poor mentality when it came to small cars, thinking that they had to be cheap “starter cars” until young people began to make more money rather than the Japanese or Euro ethos of smaller cars are just smaller versions of nice cars. I will agree the Japanese ate their lunch at this market in the 1970’s when Honda released an Accord that not only was reasonably priced, but also ran forever with proper maintenance unlike the awful Chevy Vega, whose problems were finally corrected at the end of its life - but by then the damage had been done. An old car salesman I met who worked for Honda in the 1970’s told me how they would just take orders over the phone and the cars had to have every possible shitty dealership markup (like undercoating) possible and they still charged over sticker and they had a huge waiting list as they sold the Western New York allocation of Hondas to people in Boston or NYC over the phone on Sundays! But the Big Three are still here and selling lots of cars in China. Saying the U.S. car industry was “killed off” is a tad hyperbolic, especially given Ford’s successes in Europe and finally breaking their habit of building fine smaller cars there, then a completely distantly related line of cheaper shit here. Chrysler is now owned by Fiat and may actually sell in Europe again, and Buick is huge in China…
What happened to the US car industry reminds me a lot of what occurred after the Russians launched the first Sputnik. The national crisis that resulted was a huge shock to the system and American psyche. There was talk of “having lost the high ground”. Truth be told, the US wasn’t that far behind the Russians in launching its own satellite, but the fact was, we weren’t “first” which is a fixation of ours. Kennedy set a goal of being first to the moon which was a huge spur to the aerospace industry and got the whole country going more or less as a unit. In the end, we surpassed the Russians in about six or seven years in this race after which they pretty much gave up the ghost.
I agree completely that Detroit had become fat and complacent and self-satisfied with the concept of “planned obsolescence” when people really wanted solid, reliable cars that they wouldn’t have to trade in very couple of years, a scheme that had more to do with financing, profit and creating a permanent, renewable customer base than meeting customer needs and desires. The Japanese and some Europeans handed us our derrieres on a platter. It took a long time and a near-death experience to get us past that and the final verdict is not yet in, but we may have learned some valuable lessons along the way.
During the recent crisis, I would point out that Ford took not a dime from the federal government and GM paid back all of its loans with interest. So I wouldn’t call the industry dead or “killed” by any means, but the managers will need to remain innovative, lean and mean and ever vigilant.
It’s also worth pointing out that Ford and GM are historically the only ones with a major presence outside the US for design and manufacturing, with Ford being far more significant. That’s certainly helped Ford of late - a lot of their recent small cars are just models they’ve been selling over here for years that they’ve dumbed down a bit and moved to the US market. GM has started doing the same recently, but to a lesser extent. Chrysler has been a bit of a poison chalice for years - it nearly destroyed Mercedes, so I was a bit surprised when Fiat took it on (although if I understand things correctly the US government pretty much bought it, guaranteed the liabilities and gave it to Fiat, so maybe not such a big risk).
So no, the big three aren’t dead by any means, but they only survived thanks to various distinctly non free-market practices (legal limits on the number of Japanese imported cars for instance - same thing happened in Europe). That gave them enough time (somehow) to sort out their frankly awful manufacturing practices and get a grip on quality. They’re still not as good as the Japanese, but the difference isn’t embarrassing any more.
Pay a visit to Greenfield Village, a museum that Ford did build in Dearborn. This is a huge, spectacular indoor/outdoor museum of old and new technology including locomotives, aircraft, Edison’s original lab and much, much more. Willow Run itself was much too bif to have been used as a museum and the real estate was much too valuable to just sit there.
http://www.thehenryford.org/collections/current.aspx
“Entering Greenfield Village is like stepping into an 80-acre time machine. It takes you back to the sights, sounds and sensations of America’s past. There are 83 authentic, historic structures, from Noah Webster’s home, where he wrote the first American dictionary, to Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory, to the courthouse where Abraham Lincoln practiced law. The buildings and the things to see are only the beginning. There’s the fun stuff, too. In Greenfield Village, you can ride in a genuine Model T or “pull” glass with world-class artisans; you can watch 1867 baseball or ride a train with a 19th-century steam engine. It’s a place where you can choose your lunch from an 1850s menu or spend a quiet moment pondering the home and workshop where the Wright brothers invented the airplane. Greenfield Village is a celebration of people — people whose unbridled optimism came to define modern-day America.”
These all look really nice. They are actually accurate because most of the time people screw up these things…
So its great that I have found this website with people who enjoy this era